Monthly Archives: February 2012

Eclipse RCP – Application … could not be found in the registry.

While trying to integrate Eclipse Forms into an existing Eclipse RCP application I encountered a launch issue where the launch failed with this error:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Application  could not be found in the registry. The applications available are: org.eclipse.equinox.app.error.

Well the strange thing was I could do the relevant import of Eclipse Forms package in the Java editor while doing development but I got the above error while launching it. I thought it might be launch configuration issue so I went to Project Properties > Run/Debug Settgins > [Select Launch Configuration] > Edit. This opened up the Edit Configuration dialog where we have a Plugins tab. In the plugins tab sure enough the Eclipse Forms plugin was unchecked. I checked this check box for this plugin, saved the configuration and launched the application. This time no error happened.

By default Eclipse RCP didn’t tell me what the problem was. I spent some trying to guess the problem before finding the solution. The lesson from this experience is that we should always use “-debug” argument in the launch configuration as it clearly outputs on log any error which might not be properly reported via error dialog.